AWS adds Hindi language support for Amazon Polly

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday announced the addition of Hindi language support for Amazon Polly -- a Machine Learning (ML) service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing users to create applications that talk and build new categories of speech-enabled products.

"Aditi" and "Raveena" are the two Indian English voices currently available on Amazon Polly, along with a variety of other voices in multiple languages to synthesize speech from text.

With the new addition, "Aditi" now also speaks fluent Hindi. The Amazon Polly portfolio now includes 53 voices across 26 languages.

"With the new bilingual Indian English and Hindi voice, organisations can enhance automated customer engagement applications, interactive voice responses (IVR) and targeted vernacular language services," Madhusudan Shekar, Principal Technical Evangelist, Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd (AISPL) told IANS.

AISPL is an Indian subsidiary of the Amazon Group that undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India.

"Customers can now provide mixed input in a variety of dialects including Devanagari Hindi, Romanised Hindi and English, as well as complete Hindi text input in Devanagari script," said Navdeep Manaktala, Head of Business Development at AISPL.

Domestic insurance marketplace PolicyBazaar.com is using Amazon Polly's bilingual support for their in-house IVR calling service and is looking to innovate further with the new release.

"We are already using the Hindi capability for our IVR and automated outbound updates to customers, and we saw an increase in engagement with these messages," Ashish Gupta, CTO Policybazaar.com and CEO of DocPrime.com told reporters here.

Amazon Polly is available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region.

--IANS

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